Radix vs Cosmos

Overview

Radix and Cosmos take fundamentally different approaches to scalability:

Architecture

Cosmos uses sovereign app-chains connected via Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC). Each chain runs its own consensus and maintains its own state. Cross-chain operations are asynchronous messages — there's no atomic composability between chains.

Radix uses a single sharded ledger with Cerberus braiding consensus across shards. Cross-shard transactions are atomic — they either fully succeed or fully fail, enabling DeFi composability that's impossible in the Cosmos model.

Trade-offs

Cosmos offers more app-chain sovereignty and customization. Radix offers stronger composability guarantees and a unified DeFi ecosystem. For DeFi specifically, Radix's atomic cross-shard model is more suitable — DeFi protocols need to compose with each other in single transactions.